YEAR: 2025
SIZE: approx. 180 x 100 x 60 cm
MATERIAL AND TECHNIQUE: Wild clay, tidal sediment, plant growth, drying process

For the exhibition Grensverleggers at VHDG, Leeuwarden, I shaped a lifesize body from wet, fleshy, malleable clay, raw matter gathered from the tidal flats of Friesland, where land and sea remain in perpetual flux. In the gallery space, the figure stood as a living process rather than a fixed sculpture.

Over the course of the three-month exhibition, the Oever-Wezen slowly transformed: its damp, plastic surface hardened, dried, cracked open, and began to crumble. Yet where we expect only decay, something else appeared; a plant emerged from within her body, growth sprouting from fissures of collapse.

At the finissage, the figure was carried back to the salt marsh from which she had come. There, the Oever-Wezen dissolved once more into the elements, reabsorbed by sea and soil, continuing the cycle of ebb, flow, erosion, and renewal.

This work extends my exploration of skin as a liminal material, a threshold where body meets landscape, where fragility and transformation intertwine. Like a palimpsest, the clay bore layers of inscription: shaping and unshaping, breaking down and growing anew, each gesture leaving traces that are never fully erased.